Recently I’ve been recording a singer/songwriter as part of his latest record production. His style is folk/pop so there’s a lot of acoustic guitar: strummed, picked and finger picked. You can imagine how dynamic it is! During one session we were recording his fairly quiet finger picked part which was going to be a background to other acoustic guitar parts. While he played I asked, “Is that how loud you’re going to get?” as I set the levels going into Pro Tools. He said yes. Golden.Everything was great and then after the second chorus he decided to lay into the guitar with some percussive strums. So much for not getting any louder. Now at this point many engineers would be sweating, biting their nails and possibly thinking of ways they could cover up their tracks: “I could use my de-clipping plug-in . . . or maybe I could suggest using a tape simulator plug-in and say it’s the ‘tape saturation’ you’re hearing . . . ummm, no, maybe I should just tell him it’s the tube mic, oh wait there’s no tube in it! . . . ahhh . . . oh #%$^&!!!”

But me, I could have reclined even further in my chair, sipped on a Mai Tai and thought about how much of a breeze recording engineering really can be . . .when you set the proper recording levels . . .